The Future of Consumerist

Over the last twelve years, Consumerist has been a steadfast proponent and voice on behalf of consumers, from exposing shady practices by secretive cable companies to pushing for action against dodgy payday lenders. Now, we’re joining forces with Consumer Reports, our parent organization, to cultivate the next generation of consumer advocacy.

Stay tuned as Consumerist’s current and future content finds its home as a part of the Consumer Reports brand. In the meantime, you can access existing Consumerist content below, and we encourage you to visit Consumer Reports to read the latest consumer news.

gamefly

Colleen’s mom bought her a thoughtful and frugal gift: a Zumba game disc for her Xbox that came from Gamefly’s selection of used games. She never got to play it, though, because it arrived not working. That’s not a problem, though, because you can always send defective items back. Right? [More]

Reader Andrew noticed a funny Paypal charge from Direct2Drive, a site that lets you buy computer games online and download them to your computer. Direct2Drive had helped themselves to $149.85 from his account, even though he didn’t order anything from them. [More]

Putting an end to a two-year dispute between GameFly and the U.S. Postal Service, the Postal Regulatory Commission ruled the USPS has given services such as Netflix and Blockbuster preferential treatment over its own discs. [More]

John tells Consumerist that he is having a baffling problem with Gamefly. He can’t cancel his son’s account online, but customer service is unreachable. The company keeps sending games that he doesn’t want and charging his card. What’s wrong here? Update: the account has now been closed. [More]

Yesterday we noted that Blockbuster was launching a new DVD-by-mail rental service (which Netflix promptly one-upped by announcing a new streaming agreement), and today we’re getting tips from people that the beleaguered brick and mortar movie rental company is throwing games into the offer as well. FastCompany notes that GameFly offers around 7,000 game titles compared to Blockbuster’s library of 3,000 titles. On the other hand, Blockbuster’s rental plans start at $9/mo compared to GameFly’s $16/mo (both for one disc at a time). [More]

Josh tries to keep up with the hamster wheel of video game releases through GameFly, the Netflix of gaming, but the USPS can’t seem to get the game envelopes to him. His story brings to mind the troubles GameFly has long had with the Postal Service. [More]

Inside, email addresses, phone numbers, and addresses for over 100 different companies to inject your customer service complaints into their corporate executive offices, and get it well on the way to success.

Here’s the info to escalate your complaint up to the top of the Gamefly corproate heap. Says the reader who sent this in, “I left a message and sent an email and 20 minutes later a manager called and fixed my problem in 5 minutes. It was like magic, delicious fairy sparkly consumery magic.”

Wanted to point out a bad experience I had yesterday with the Gamefly deal; [A sale we had linked to – Ed.] not the deal itself but a link they post after it which harvests all of your personal info from Gamefly (including credit card details I think) by simply submitting any e-mail address. You do get a 10 buck coupon but ugh man, I promise you my mailbox is going to be friggen’ overflowing with junk next month – this site was all sorts of sketch.